Kitty Burns Florey

Long ago, in what certainly seems like a galaxy far away, I owned a house in the upper foothills of the Catskills. This is not to be confused with the house I owned more recently in the lower foothills of the Catskills. The first house was a big, ungainly old place on 52 acres in the town of Livingstonville. Livingstonville was in the middle of nowhere (unless you count Oak Hill and Preston Hollow), which is why my first husband and I bought it. Also, it was dirt-cheap, for reasons that eventually became clear.

But this is not a post about a house. The house got sold eventually, and just before the sale was final I drove up there with my then-friend (later second husband), Ron, to remove a few last things and close the place up.

The 52 acres included an enormous pine woods, its tall trees planted in precisely regimented rows in the ‘30s as a WPA project (or so a neighbor told us). It was a glorious summer day, and after we loaded the car we hiked across the east meadow and into the woods to one of the property’s most interesting destinations: a 1947 Buick that sat among the rows of trees like a huge, sad, wrecked beetle, quietly rusting on a bed of pine needles, its carcass riddled with bullet holes by hunters. (more…)